Julian Hyde (Apache Calcite, Google) gave a crisp presentation on this and how SQL could express 'measures' to bridge the gap: https://communityovercode.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/mon...

> A semantic layer, also known as a metrics layer, lies between business users and the database, and lets those users compose queries in the concepts that they understand. It also governs access to the data, manages data transformations, and can tune the database by defining materializations.

There's also now a paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.00251

Thanks for your hint, I added the definition of it to the article.